Against Interpretation: And Other Essays

No textual reviews can be excluded.

This was a ground breaking collection of essays back in the late sixites and it has proved its relevance to topical issues like the connection between content and style in a range of media, cinema, novels and visual arts right into the new millennium.

Recently finished this collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. Although I can’t really say that I learned anything new from reading them, or that they transformed my viewpoint on anything, or that I gained any new insights, I don’t regret the experience. For one thing, it reminded me of my college years, when so many of us earnestly went to see French New Wave films or other “art films” by Ingmar Bergman or the Italian directors, and then we would discuss them in dorm rooms or the student union later on, and pretend that we knew what we were talking about. Similarly with avant-garde paintings, or experimental music, or theater of the absurd – we TRIED to understand them. And Sontag is all about being serious in one’s approach to art, theater, cinema and literature. Today, by contrast, I sense many of us no longer approach modern art and philosophy with any attempt at all to seriously engage with it. Sontag herself was a book reader par excellence, reportedly having a library of 15,000 books in her New York apartment. In this book of essays she can be a little “show-offy” with her erudition, listing multiple authors or works to underline a point she’s making. Or she will make comparisons, I’m not quoting her here but something along the lines of “the films of Godard are no more like those of Resnais than the paintings of Mondrian are like those of Kandinsky,” which tells the reader that she is of course intimately familiar with all four of those individuals. I was out-and-out amused almost to a literal LOL by her essay “The Imagination of Disaster” in which she turns her laser-like intelligence and scholarly analysis to science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s. In an afterward to the version I read, written 30 years later, she recollected going to two or three movies a day, back in the sixties when she was in New York writing these essays. It’s simply funny to me to have a critical essay written about such films as “The Attack of the Puppet People” or the schlocky Japanese monster film “Rodan” and see her incorporating references to Plato, Aristotle, and Melville’s “Typee” in the process. And also amusing to envision Susan Sontag sitting in a theater watching these kinds of movies. But to her credit, in this essay she pin-pointed the centrality to these films – especially the more expensive, color productions – of the disaster sequences, or cities being blown up and buildings collapsing. In this she anticipated the much-later phrase of “disaster porn” in the post 9-11 era where Hollywood just lavishly filled the screen with all manner of destruction, vividly rendered.

As a student of the 1960's, this essay collection is a really wonderful asset. Sontag, in New York, was at the center of a phenomenal cultural change in the arts. Most people have forgotten about or never learned about seminal figures such as Jack Smith, but Sontag deals with him, as well as Happenings, surrealism, and John Cage, from a decidedly francophile perspective. Well worth the time spent.

Her insight on art is breath-taking.

very engaging book. many great questions and unraveling thoughts about the existing strict thoughts on art and art analysis.

I thouroughly enjoyed reading Ms. Sontag's intelligent and insightful essays.

Bought this for a Christmas gift